Canon Vixia HF11 Review: Excellent HD Quality in a Tiny Package

The Canon Vixia HF11 camcorder is a more powerful HF10. It's sleek black and compact, has a round design and good performance. It has twice as much memory as the HF10 (32GB vs. 16GB), which is a good thing with 24 Mbps recording.

With the SD card and the battery inside, the Canon Vixia HF11 weighs 15.1 oz, and its dimensions are 2.9x2.5x5.1. As with the Sony Handycam HDR-CX12, its top competitor, the Canon Vixia HF11 fits into your pocket, unlike the HG20 and 21, or the HV30. Plus, although it's made from plastic, this camcorder feels pretty well put together.

The Canon Vixia HF11 is a shrunken design without all the usual sacrifices in features. It has both the 32 GB internal memory and the option for SDHC memory. It will do about three hours of 24Mbps video recording, which supports 1920x1080 capture. At 5Mbps, it runs for about 12.5 hrs. The card causes no loss in recording quality, as long as it's Class 4 or better.

The BP-809 890mAh battery that comes with the Canon Vixia HF11 isn't quite enough security for most with a capacity equivalent to 55 min of recording, so you might want to get the BP-819, which does double that, although it will also take away from the sleekness of your camcorder.

Video quality is preserved on the Canon Vixia HF11even with the smaller 1/3.2 inch 3.3 megapixel CMOS sensor, a reduction from the HV30 and Sony CX7. Low lighting tends to increase noise and compress the range of tones, although it still performs better than average, retaining a lot of detail. That's really where your 24Mbps video option comes in handy, since, until then, it's really indistinguishable from the 17Mbps setting. The higher mode produces more noise, though, when viewed on large screen plasmas, though. On a frame-by-frame level, the differences between these two settings were even fewer, but I was glad not to hit any incompatibility with the new 24Mbps mode.

Sony gave its CX7 touch screen controls, which isn't something everyone likes, and I think the race with the Canon Vixia HF11 is pretty close. There are other Canons, however, that it might be harder to compare with the Canon Vixia HF11. I actually think the HF10 is the best of the Canons, but it's up to you to decide whether or not the Canon Vixia HF11 is a good camcorder for your personal use. It performs well, anyway, if you do favor this model.